Self-orientalisation and
reorientation: a glimpse
at Iranian Muslim
women’s memoirs
Sanaz Fotouhi1
Abstract
For centuries people from the East and West have been interested in understanding each
other‟s cultures and way of life. Gender dichotomy in the Middle East and the historical
exclusion of female members of society from the public sphere have shrouded Middle
Eastern women‟s lives in mystery for those in the West. Often orientalist tales emerging
from the Middle East portray the Middle Eastern Muslim woman as silent, and an abused
victim of the patriarchal culture. Those in the West have dreamed of unveiling and
demystifying her existence. However, over the last several decades, particularly in the last
ten years following 9/11, there has been an influx of narratives by Middle Eastern women
themselves that promise to unravel and unveil the lives of Middle Eastern women. Among
them, Muslim women of Arab, African and Iranian backgrounds have published hundreds
of books recounting various aspects of their lives in the Middle East. Yet many of these
narratives, despite aspiring to become a platform for the voices of Middle Eastern women,
appear to be involved in further self-orientalisation. While the covers of many of these
books, with the veiled woman peering out at the audience, invite the western reader to free
her from her oppression by reading her tale, the content of these books confirm what the
western reader already assumes about the oppression of Muslim women in the Middle East.
In this paper I consider the socio-political and historical context into which Middle Eastern
women‟s narratives are appearing. Taking Iranian women‟s memoirs as an example, and
considering the socio-political background of some of the authors, I examine the reasons
1 Sanaz Fotouhi received her PhD from the University of New South Wales with a thesis on post-revolutionary
diasporic Iranian literature in English. She holds a BA and MPhil from the University of Hong Kong. She is
currently one of the co-directors of the Persian International Film Festival based in Sydney. This paper was
presented at the Cultural Studies Association of Australasia Conference ‘Cultural ReOrientations and
Comparative Colonialities’, Adelaide, 22–24 November 2011.
© 2012 Sanaz Fotouhi
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why their narratives, despite claiming to be a platform to free them from orientalist
stereotypes, are in fact leading to further self-reorientalisation.
Historically, people in the East and the West have always been interested in understanding
each other‟s culture and way of life. Gender issues, particularly gender dichotomy in the
Middle East, have shrouded Middle Eastern women‟s lives in mystery for the West. Many in
the West have been fascinated by Middle Eastern women‟s situation. Yet these veiled women
have mostly remained and continue to remain an enigma. Consequently, this has led to
overexaggeration of the situation of Muslim women, and over centuries many have
constructed the assumption that „veiled women were necessarily more oppressed, more
passive, more ignorant than unveiled women‟, leading to „exaggerated statements about the
imprisoned existence of women in “the Orient”‟ (Mabro 1991: 3).
Such gross exaggerations, however, can historically and partially be blamed on the position of
Muslim women themselves, and their vehement absence as individuals with their own voice in
the western world. Until recently Muslim women, particularly those in the Middle East, did
not have the social and educational means to express themselves beyond the borders of their
own countries. It has only been recently, as the result of revolutions, wars and disruptions in
the region, and mass migrations from the Middle East to other countries, that some Middle
Eastern women have, to a certain degree, gained the opportunity to narrate their own stories.
Adding to their ability to express themselves has also been the conflict in and interest in the
region. That is why over the last several decades, particularly since 9/11, there has been an
influx of popular narratives in the West by Middle Eastern women, which promise to unravel
the situation and unveil their life in their own voice in the West. Many of these accounts, as I
examine elsewhere,2 are a response to the author‟s emotional experiences and act as healing
devices for those who faced traumas of war, revolution and migration, forming sites for the
reconstruction of their sense of identity. However, the production, reception and consumption
of these books are also highly influenced by the socio-political and historical context of the
author‟s home country, as well as that of the host country, to the point that sometimes,
2 I discuss this issue at length in my PhD thesis, Ways of being, lines of becoming: a study of post-revolutionary
diasporic Iranian writing, completed at the University of New South Wales in 2012.
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despite aspiring to become a platform for the voices of women, they appear to be involved in
further self-orientalisation. In this paper I take diasporic Iranian women‟s memoirs as an
example of how such narratives can be read as a kind of self-orientalisation.
Iranian women‟s memoirs have emerged in the English-speaking West in two waves. The
first of the memoirs appeared immediately after the 1979 revolution, after the mass
migrations of Iranians from Iran. The appearance and interest in these books not
coincidentally coincided with western fascination with Iran, after the overthrow of the Shah
and his replacement by the seemingly violent and fanatic Islamic regime, and after the
dramatic American hostage crisis in Iran. At a time when Iranian borders were closed, and
when restrictive Islamic laws forced women into veiling, any account that shed light,
particularly on women‟s situation, became of interest for western readers. The second wave of
Iranian women‟s memoirs appeared after 9/11 in light of Iran‟s renewed conflict with the
West, and the increasing human rights issues affecting Iranian citizens. Consequently, over
the last three and half decades Iranian women have published nearly sixty memoirs.
While the first wave of memoirs was published by women who had recently experienced
migration, the second wave has been mostly delayed narratives of the revolution, often told by
women who migrated as children or as young adults, and who have now, after years, had a
chance to contemplate their own stories and lives. For this reason, many of these narratives
are accounts that act as a kind of therapy and offer closure for those who have had to struggle
with various traumas in both Iran and abroad.
At the same time, these memoirs have also been particularly appealing for western readers,
particularly Americans, because, as Gillian Whitlock observed, they „attract American readers
again now, and … revisit and fold the events of the Islamic revolution and its aftermath into
the present one more time‟ (2007: 163). Emerging at the height of tensions between Iran and
America, these narratives were received by „the curious and uninformed American readership
eager to know about Iran and primed for the stories of disenchantment by exiles‟ (p 65).
Received in this kind of socio-political environment, and aimed at a readership with specific
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expectations, often the production of these books also conveys and adheres to certain
conventions expected of Middle Eastern women‟s narratives. Titles and covers, blurbs and
promotions for these books often draw on notions of silence, veiling and unveiling, oppression
and imprisonment, highlighting the acute difference between women‟s lives over „there‟ and
here. In fact so frequently have Iranian women‟s memoirs been presented and published
within a certain kind of prescribed framework that this has created what Catherine Burwell
called „particular modes of reading‟ (2007: 288).
Such modes of readings become clear as soon as we glance at some of the covers of books
published by Iranian women. Of all the Iranian women‟s memoirs over the past several
decades, more than half are presented with a similar cover image of a sole woman with some
sort of a veil. In some the women are bare headed and have the veil hanging around their
necks; in others, they are shadowy and distant figures wearing an enclosing black Iranianstyle veil called a chador. But the covers most commonly feature a woman‟s half-veiled face,
only her eyes showing, piercing and staring at the audience. The veiled women, with only
their eyes peering out at the viewers, as in the covers of Unveiled (1995), Prisoner of Tehran
(2008), Journey from the land of no (2004), Rage against the veil (1999), In the house of my Bibi
(2008), and Watch me (2010), are inviting and yet challenging the viewer/reader to pick up the
book to enter into their mysterious, hidden world. The eyes in these images, sharp in focus,
distinguish each woman from the other under the veil, a humanising strategy suggesting that
the woman behind the veil „can look back at the spectator mute but eloquent‟ (Whitlock 2007:
59). However, what is interesting to note is that, despite this humanising strategy, there is a
sense of generalisation, a kind of „one woman‟s story is every woman‟s story‟ approach. If we
look, for instance, at the covers of Journey from the land of no and Prisoner of Tehran the same
set of eyes is peering back at us, hinting at the similarity of these two narratives. All of these
images, despite their slight variations, tap „into a [western] fantasy of the illicit penetration of
the hidden and gendered spaces of the “Islamic World”‟ (2007: 58). They are „invit[ing] and
encourag[ing] the Western imperial gaze, offering Westerners a glimpse into the presumably
forbidden world beneath the veil‟ (Whitlock 2008: 81).
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This invitation is almost a call for acknowledgement by the western reader, an appeal for
recognition, from women who have so far been silenced in their own country. However, the
30
fact that the western reader is involved in this act of unveiling and recognition operates on an
acceptance of cultural dichotomy between the narrator and the reader, appealing, as Whitlock
also reminds us, to the western tradition of benevolence. It is only by the book being picked
up by the western reader that Iranian women can be recognised and thereby regain their
sense of subjectivity. This recognition, however, operates on a presumption that Iranian
women are oppressed, and imprisoned behind the veil, and that they need western
readers/values to liberate them from their social imprisonment.
The titles too, add layers to and heighten these elements. Titles like Unveiled: life and death
among the Ayatollahs, Out of Iran: one woman’s escape from the Ayatollahs, In the house of my Bibi:
growing up in revolutionary Iran, Honeymoon in Tehran: two years of love and danger in Iran, and
Rage against the veil: the courageous life and death of an Islamic dissident draw on the urgency of
life, death and revolution, and debated issues of the veil and unveiling. They feed into
orientalist perspectives and are, as Whitlock argued, „designed to grab the Western eye with a
glimpse of absolute difference, of the exotic‟ (2007: 59). At a time of America‟s „war on terror‟,
and Iran‟s presence in the axis of evil, these titles feed into this discourse and are „a way of
positioning them for metropolitan markets‟ (p 59).
However, while titles and covers are often constructed by publishers as selling points,
sometimes with authors themselves having little control over them, it is not only the covers
and titles that conform to a kind of orientalist vision. Interestingly enough, the content of
some of these books, too, reaffirms the position of Iranian women as oppressed and lacking
freedom. The question that arises is why are Iranian women, who claim to be the voices of
oppressed women, describing Iranian women within predefined discursive spaces?
While this can be partially explained by the publishing industry‟s marketing strategies, the
reason for the description of Iranian women within certain frameworks in the content of these
books can be explained in relation to the socio-historical and cultural background of some of
the memoirists themselves. Indeed, the origin of this kind of representation has historical
roots and dates back to the introduction of concepts of western modernity, including
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feminism, in Iran. As Mohammad Tavakoli-Targhi, an Iranian historian, has proposed, much
of what forms the modern narrative of Iranian history is influenced by western and
Eurocentric notions of modernity and concepts of „occidental rationality‟ (2001: 4) He believes
that, „whereas Europeans reconstituted the modern self in relation to their non-Western
Others, Asians and Africans [and Middle Easterners] began to redefine their self in relation
to Europe, their new significant Other‟ (p 4). At the heart of this definition was a sort of
„binary opposition‟ influenced heavily by colonial and orientalist language that defined what
was constituted as modern – western – and what was not. Although there were a few markers
of difference that distinguished Iranian society from the modernised West, one of the biggest
signs of difference was the condition of Iranian women. This was clearly marked in how
Iranian women dressed, which immediately became a sign of Iran‟s backwardness not only in
the eyes of the West but also from the perspective of certain groups of western educated
Iranian modernists. These ideas constructed a specific class within Iranian society in which
women were given new forms of freedom. Consequently, some women gained the opportunity
for education and entrance into the public domain. This not only exposed women to
alternative concepts of gender relationships, particularly those driven by newly imported
concepts of western feminism, but also gave them the ability to comment on and challenge
social norms. This, as Nasrine Rahimieh has argued, has „informed [much of] Iran‟s
understanding of its own history‟ (2003: 148). This influence on Iranian society, steeped in
orientalist notions and dichotomies that were carried across with western notions of
modernity, as Rahimieh argued, „underwrite the history of modern Iran‟ (p 148). Furthermore,
the revolution, which re-emphasised the East–West and gender dichotomies, created
unresolved contradictions, not only between Iran and the West but also between Iranians
themselves. As Said told us, „the modern Orient … participates in its own Orientalizing‟ (Said
1978: 325). This means that Iranians themselves, as pro-government writers from Iran, as
educated diasporic writers, or even in defending women‟s rights, are involved in the politics of
what Rahimieh calls „self-orientalisation‟. It is on this basis that I argue that diasporic Iranian
women memoirists are involved in self-orientalisation. As Nima Naghibi put it, „in
representing Persian women, [many] draw on what Foucault has called the “already-said,” or
rather the repressed “never-said” of manifest discourse‟ (2007: xvii). Many Iranian women
32
writers, coming from that privileged and educated class of Iranian society, to some degree
identify with this discourse. As Naghibi reminded us
privileged Iranian women in the nineteenth century … participated in the discursive
subjugation of their working-class Persian counterparts. By positioning the Persian
woman as the embodiment of oppressed womanhood, Western and elite Iranian women
represented themselves as epitomical of modernity and progress. (p xvii)
I believe that this approach operates to date, particularly among diasporic western-educated
women. One can argue that this has contributed to the somewhat limited descriptions and
frameworks in their memoirs.
We only have to glance at the list of women who have been writing to prove this point. Most
of the women who have written memoirs about their experiences can be traced to new modern
Iranian elite families. Just to name a few, Azar Nafisi, the author of Reading Lolita in Tehran
(2004), is the daughter of one of Tehran‟s mayors during the Shah‟s regime; her mother was
one of the first women members of parliament during the Shah‟s regime. Nafisi is always
proud of her mother‟s role, as well as of the fact that her grandmother attended university
when other women barely left their homes. Sattareh Farman-Farmaian, the narrator of
Daughter of Persia (1996), is a Qajar princess with a father who insisted on his daughter‟s
education, even letting her go to America as one of the first women to travel outside Iran by
herself in the early 1900s, at a time when her friends were being plucked out of middle school
to get married. Lily Monadjemi, who wrote Blood and carnations (1993), and more recently A
matter of survival (2010), is the descendent of Nasser-Al-Din Shah, one of the Iranian Shahs
responsible for Iranians‟ encounter with modernity. Marjan Satrapi, the creator of Persepolis
(2003) comic series, is a descendent of a Qajar monarch. Davar Ardalan, the author of My name
is Iran (2008), is the daughter of Laleh Bakhtiar, one of the most prominent Iranian/American
women scholars, and one of the only women who has translated the Koran from a feminist
perspective. She traces her family tree back to Fath-Ali-Shah Qajar. Similarly, Shusha Guppy,
the author of many books including The blindfold horse (1988), also a songwriter, singer and
33
filmmaker, was the daughter of a famous Iranian theologian who sent her to Paris in 1952 to
study oriental languages and philosophy when she was only seventeen.
Although the above list is not inclusive of all writers with similar backgrounds, and excludes
women of equal calibre in other areas, such as in sciences, politics, humanitarian work and so
forth, as contributors to western (and Iranian) society, it is inclusive enough to demonstrate
that most of what is being written about Iran outside Iran presently is informed by a specific
class of Iranian society. This is not to deny or ignore the fact that women of non-aristocratic
background, like Marina Nemat, Firoozeh Dumas, Gina Nahai and Susan Pari, are also
contributing to this discourse. However, they too, though not carrying royal blood, by virtue
of living outside Iran and writing in English could be considered within this privileged class
of Iranian society.
This is not to say that all Iranian writers are oblivious to this ironic self-orientalisation. Some
have tried to defy these predefined modes of reading and representation. Fatemeh Keshavarz,
for instance, in her memoir Jasmine and stars (2007) tried to reframe this position, starting
even from the cover of her book. Instead of using the conventional cover of passive veiled
exotic women, her book has two modern Iranian girls with sunglasses, actively holding up
signs, one reading „We women want equal rights‟, and the other, „violence against women
equals violence against humanity‟. In the content of her book, too, Keshavarz was very selfconscious. She clearly announced that her memoir is a critique of what she calls „New
Orientalist‟ narratives emerging from Iran by Iranian women, which are „exaggerated and
oversimplified at best and fully distorted at worst‟ (p 111). She compared the popularity of
these memoirs to Rumi‟s elephant in the dark tale, where an elephant is brought into a city at
night where no-one has seen one before. As each person touches each part of the elephant,
they reduce their understanding to the partial encounter. She believes recently people in the
West, as a „matter of life or death‟ (p 7), want to know about the Middle East. Like the
townspeople, they reach out to anyone with the hope of learning anything they can. But the
problem is that most of these views, like each person‟s interpretation of the elephant, are
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limited and partial. In her memoir Keshavarz hopes to create „an alternative approach for
learning about an unfamiliar culture‟ (p 2).
Although there is much more to say about this, my conclusion is partially hopeful. Following
the controversial 2009 elections a shift occurred in the way Iran and Iranians were viewed in
the West. With the rapid circulation of clips from protests, a different Iran came into view.
Here, women were no longer silent, passive and domestic. Rather, they could be seen
alongside the men in opposition to the government. As the world witnessed, women like Neda
Agha Sultan, who was shot in the street and died on camera, suffered the violation of their
rights as humans at the hands of the Islamic government. Out of the ashes of these protests, a
new interest emerged in narratives emerging from Iran. The world was no longer interested
in delayed stories by silenced and oppressed diasporic women. Rather, people wanted to hear
stories about what was happening in Iran at the moment. Consequently, we are now seeing
the beginnings of a third wave of memoirs from Iran, not only from Iranian women but more
so from Iranian men. My partial hopefulness only considers the fact Iranian women are now
being seen in a new light; yet what I am not so hopeful about is the modes of readings
surrounding the production, reception and consumption of this newly emerging third wave of
Iranian memoirs.
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